Monday, March 14, 2011

Everybody knows the Android ecosystem has been growing tremendously over the last two years, and will be growing even more this year. The number of apps available on the Android market, the number of phones, and also the users of the AppBrain Android market are skyrocketing.

Although Android is an open ecosystem, this doesn’t mean useful statistics are easy to find. Google only occasionally discloses the number of apps available on the Android market. Even official data that is highly useful for developers, like the usage numbers of the different Android SDK versions, are only infrequently updated, and official data on for instance popularity of phone models is missing altogether.

Today we launch “AppBrain Android stats”. This is a view of the Android market, Android phones and AppBrain usage which we compile from the data we gather from the Android market, and from aggregated usage numbers of our own Android app and site. We hope this part of our site will help give developers, users and other people interested in the Android ecosystem useful data, and besides that it’s just plain fun to browse! These statistics will be updated on a daily basis.

Here are just a few interesting bits of information we gathered from the new pages:
- We know there are currently roughly 150,000 Android apps available on the Android market, but roughly about 37% of those are low quality apps. (But Google seems to be removing some of those lately!)

- The most popular Android phone among AppBrain users is the Samsung Galaxy S. The most used SDK currently is 2.2 (Froyo), but 2.3 (Gingerbread) is starting to grow, and even Honeycomb is slowly showing up!
- The Android category with the most apps is Entertainment (21K), but it also has a high ratio of low quality apps (51%). The category with the highest proportion of paid apps is Personalization (75% paid apps), but their average price is the lowest of all categories: $ 1.25.
- The overall most searched terms has a number of evergreens like Angry Birds and facebook, but the hot searches show what people are searching for have been in the news lately (Read it later for instance).

Do you find some interesting bit of information in the pages? Or would you like us to add certain data? Let us know in the comments.